Bob Herbert on Spying and the First Amendment
I took two copyright free art clips, edited and
combined them to get this image of illegal snooping.
Herbert's column today points to the fact that illegal wiretapping can have a chilling effect on the First Amendment.
Have you ever talked sexy to your wife or your girlfriend - or your husband or your boyfriend - on the telephone? Would you keep talking if you thought that one of Dick Cheney's operatives was listening in?
Talk about a chilling effect.
What if you were thinking of running for Congress and you tried to bolster your understanding of terrorism by speaking with knowledgable but controversial figures in the Middle East? How would you feel if you knew - or even suspected - that government agents were monitoring your conversations? Would you be less likely to engage in those conversations? Would you begin to censor yourself? Would your contacts still be willing to speak freely if they thought the feds were listening in?
Herbert says that most people are looking at the violations of the Fourth Amendment and the FISA Act, but that the real threat is to the First Amendment.
Herbert quotes Lawrence Tribe, Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard University, about the erosion of rights that is brough abouta by unchecked illegal domestic spying :" 'The background assumptions of privacy will be gradually eroded to the point where we'll wake up one day, or our children will, and it will seem quaint that people at one time, long ago, thought that they could speak in candor.' "
This is why Samuel Alito must be voted down with a filibuster, if necessary. It's not Roe v. Wade that's the crucial issue here. It is the deconstruction of our beloved Constitution.
Note: Bob Herbert is a columnist at the New York Times, which has put its columnists behind a wall, so providing a link to his column is pointless. This was a bad decision by the New York Times which, of course, they will not admit. Online readership is down. How do I know? We get home delivery of the Times and we recently got a call from them telling us that as subscribers we're entitled to use the online pages. They wouldn't be doing that if they weren't getting the numbers to claim success in this endeavor.